Playing Oppression

A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.

Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism.

Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games’ most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination.

An essential addition to any player’s bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.Acknowledgments vii
1 Colonial Fantasies 1
2 Establishing Mindsets: Politics and Ideology in Early Board Games 21
3 World as Empire 39
4 Trading Excuses 67
5 Winners and Losers: Western Board Games in the Postwar Era 91
6 Explorers and Exploiters 113
7 Representations of the Other 125
8 Urgency and Hope: A Countercolonial Revolution 145
Glossary 169
Notes 173
Bibliography 195
Ludography 209
Index 217“A rigorous exploration of colonialist themes and mechanics in historical and modern board games that contains fascinating new exemplars, unflinching discussions of modern favorites, and a hopeful sighting of a way to go beyond insidious colonialist tropes in innovative designs.”
—Tracy Fullerton, Director, USC Game Innovation Lab; Designer, Walden, a game

“Flanagan and Jakobsson amply demonstrate how and why the history of board games grew intertwined with the logics of colonialism; in ranging through examples from the curious to the well-known, they also provide an culturally-driven primer on both subjects.”
—Naomi Clark, Associate Arts Professor, NYU Tisch School of the Arts; author of A Game Design Vocabulary

“Playing Oppression illuminates how colonization came to be reproduce in miniature on countless dining room tables and provides vital and innovative strategies for disentangling modern board games from the myth of empire.”
—Jonathan McIntosh, creator of the Pop Culture Mary Flanagan, an award-winning game designer and artist, is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Chair of Film and Media Studies, and director of the Tiltfactor game research lab at Dartmouth College. She is the author of seven books, including Critical Play (MIT Press).

Mikael Jakobsson plays, creates, teaches, and researches games at the MIT Game Lab and with the artist collective Popsicleta, where his work focuses on the border between game design and game culture. He contributed to Debugging Game History (MIT Press).